Kendama Weight dissapointment, Help needed.

[AlexSmith]

The only tricks I find disrupted by a weight imbalanced setup are spacewalk / air-tricks, and probably juggles. Otherwise, if tama is 0-9% heavier or so, it's fine by me (that works out to about 7-8 grams for your average ken). I bought a keyaki Sanga at KWC that is like 20 grams off (tama heavy). Sucks to spacewalk but cup game is great on it.

I am surprised to hear that a retailer was trying to be dishonest, that is never a good experience. I appreciate it is hard to offer accurate weight matching on competitively priced kendamas though. Terra sometimes offers guarantees such as 'within 5 grams', but in reality they were all within 2.5 grams on my scale, just to be safe. Wood is a variable material, and it can pick up (or lose) weight through moisture, so when a customer receives the product, it can be different on their scale. On small scale Terra productions we will list the weight of each individual piece, but doing this at scale for lower priced items would be a nightmare!

[Kev]

As Void mentions, relative weight must be a contributing factor to why those extra nice kendamas feel that way to you.

And as Alex says, weights can vary a lot due to environmental factors.

It would be interesting[1] to weigh the same tama and a ken every day for a year in the same environment and see how much it is affected by changes in weather and humidity etc.

@AlexSmith - do you have any insight into this from your experience? I'd guess that once a wood is acclimatised to an environment it remains stable if it stays in that environment but taking from inside to outside on a cold / wet / humid or whatever day will probably induce significant changes to weight?

On a similar note - where I live I've noticed that when I get a kendama through the post it often arrives with the tama a little squashed / egg shaped? I think this is because it's most likely been kept in a freezing cold postal depot overnight before delivery so the wood contracts, but because of the grain it doesn't contract evenly (one way contracts more than the other)- leading to the 'dreaded egg'! Luckily as this is only a temporary change (nearly) every time they return to spherical once back in room temperature.[2]

 

1.	to me at least!
2.	I wonder if something roughly opposite happens in hotter places?!?!

[AlexSmith]

@Kev I don't think weight would change too much day-to-day, the variance in the reading of the scale would probably change more than the actual weight (assuming most kendama players probably just buy the cheapest $25 scale they can find at a local headshop). I'm trying to find info on moisture content and it's relation to weight online, but I can only find info on expansion / contraction of wood with moisture content. I guess this makes sense, considering carpenters would care about expansion much more than weight.

Overall, I'd definitely say that you'll see the ken/tama change shape more than vary in weight. Mostly this is visible in the tama, like you said. Wood expands most perpendicular to the plane of the woodgrain, leading to eggy tamas! See: OG Ozoras.

[Kev]

Yes I think you're right Alex, to be honest we are not dealing with a huge amount of wood in one single kendama so the difference between its dry weight and soaked weight is probably not huge at all.

It's funny how I don't really notice the expansion and contraction in the Ken much but an eggy Tama can drive a man crazy!